Untitled

Gobardhan Ash enrolled in the Government College of Art in 1926 and, deeply disillusioned by the curriculum, dropped out and joined the Madras School of Art to train under the mentorship of Devi Prosad Roychowdhury. Ash responded to the turbulence of the Bengal Famine with a series of rusty brown washes, which hovers somewhere between the gritty documentation of Chittaprosad and the abstract energy of Somnath Hore. Drawing from the vocabulary of Primitivism, Ash painted several portraits and figures, where the subjects have been reduced to their mere contours. In this portrait, a person looks up in dejection. The colours of the face—with the black lines bleeding into the reds—suggest a vulnerable state.